Excerpted from the Logs of Artificial Human No 18
by tim333
Summary: 18 reflects on her life. Companion to "Only Human."


Author's Note: It's been a long time. This is a companion piece to "Only Human," a brief look at my take on 18's POV. Enjoy.

-Excerpted from the logs of Artificial Human Number 18-

by Tim333

---

My name is 18 -- yes, I have accepted that. I'm a cyborg. Some have described cyborgs as something both human and machine, but in my experience this is false. I am neither.

I am not the human girl who was thoughtlessly killed and gutted, her life pointlessly cut short to help satisfy the twisted ambitions of a disgusting little man. I will never know her. I have on several occasions considered attempting to find information on "my" former life, but I've always decided it would be pointless. I have a command of my memories any human would envy, but not a shred of that person remains. It would be even worse if I found that anyone who knew her still lives. Meeting me would only make their sad lives worse. I am not that person.

I am not the war machine created by Dr. Gero to enslave or destroy humankind. I was supposed to be, but I'm not. In another version of history, my brother and I were the disaster that destroyed the world. I can say with confidence that doing that was not against my character when my life began, but in this timeline, that isn't the way things happened. All I cared to destroy was Gero himself; after that I became rather aimless. My first memory is of being told I was a machine, and for a time I believed it, but even then, I never was. I still can't disguise my bitterness at my early, foolish times, but I knew nothing. I was an infant pretending to be a monster.

If asked, "what are you?", cyborg is the only label I can honestly use, but it has meant less to me as time has passed. Other labels come to mean more. Although it still - still, amazingly, after these years - makes me confused and uncomfortable on some level, "wife" and "mother" are among the labels I have come to treasure and jealously guard.

I enter the kitchen; my husband is there. He is a small, simple man, ignored or overlooked by many. In groups people tend to pass him over, assuming he has nothing useful to contribute. It is true that he can be infuriatingly simple-minded, but I have come to appreciate his complexity. Understand that among many who have been called heroes, only he saw anything worth saving in me. I owe him more than my life. He helped me learn, slowly and with a patience I have rarely encountered in humans, that I don't need to pretend to be an emotionless machine.

"Good morning, 18!" Kuririn almost sings as he makes breakfast.

"Hello," I say.

"Sleep well last night?"

"Kuririn, you know I didn't sleep last night." I require a small fraction of the amount of sleep needed by humans. He says things like this to me anyway.

"Aw, you know, just makin' conversation. Hey, you want your eggs scrambled?"

"Yes. Don't forget, you have to take Marron to softball practice this afternoon."

"Yeah, I know. Oh, hey, speaking of Marron, look who's up! I made coffee for you on the counter, Marron-chan."

My daughter mumbles her acknowledgement as she shuffles forward to retrieve her coffee. While not as keen on early mornings as Kuririn, at least she doesn't sleep in like our housemates, the old man and the pig.

"Thanks, Dad," she says, sitting, and smiles. She looks at me and, even with her groggy appearance, her big vibrant eyes and soft easy smile make me feel naked. Like Kuririn, she has that effortless talent for expression that I lack, but she also displays a remarkable confidence.

Even after Kuririn helped me open up, I remained profoundly alienated from the world and its people. It was little Marron, shocking in her youthful audacity, who dragged the both of us into human contact, rushing heedlessly, even joyously, into the same social interactions I feared. The strength she displays in associating with people even in those most unpleasant and anxious of situations amazes me, and there are moments when I wonder if we are holding her back, this beautiful young girl, with our strangeness and isolation. These moments pass, however. If she is strong, we have taught her strength, and our strangeness is the foundation for her unflinching character. I have done my best to teach her self-sufficiency, and when she goes, I will not hold her back, but I will always be proud of the human being I, against all odds, raised with my husband.

I love my family. Other humans would not believe me, they would be unable to get past the fact that I don't express it in the ways they expect, but Kuririn and Marron know that I would do anything for them.

I know that you don't care about my feelings, reader. I know that anyone reading these logs could only be a robotics researcher, poring over my once-again gutted body, scouring my fucked-up, messy, jury-rigged form for clues to the workings of mad genius. You are likely more interested in the diagnostics that accompany these logs than my words. I can't blame you. In your place, I might take the same approach. To be honest, my confidence that you don't care is likely the only thing allowing me to undertake this recording, which I cannot erase - I don't have that access, it's one of the ways in which the old bastard successfully denied me my autonomy - without constantly guarding my thoughts. Even now, to admit my weakness repulses me, but I want someone to know. That is why I started these manual logs again after so long a gap.

Yes, I am allowing myself this vanity, this illogical want. I want someone to know that I was a person, that I felt things, that it meant something. It would have been so much easier to stay the way I was, to remain immature like my brother. When I was born, the world and my own nature frightened and confused me so intensely that the only way I could begin to cope was to adopt an aloof superiority, to separate myself in order to avoid having to acknowledge everything that I had lost. Even for a human this attitude would be difficult to break out of, but for me, knowing nothing, with these concepts hard-coded in alien instructions in my mind, the shell that formed was especially airtight. It bound to my skin in grafts, to each cybernetic implant in tangles of sharp silver wire. Each time a piece was ripped off it was excruciating; it made me want to lash out, to kill and destroy, to protect myself, even to destroy myself, but I emerged. Though I had help, the decision was mine alone, and I did it. I want you to know.

I have discovered so much, so much that these humans take for granted. I have found startling depth and fascinating beauty -- in the feelings I once derided as illogical and in the humans I once dismissed as weak. I have learned there is more than one kind of strength.

My name is 18, and I did not simply function, I lived. That is what I want you to know.


End file.
